On Friday Aug. 22, a meeting was held. David Allen, publisher of Black Box Voting www.blackboxvoting.com attended this meeting, which was a private teleconference among voting industry insiders that was supposed to be secret. He obtained a transcript and a document.

A Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who co-wrote an influential report alleging flaws in touch-screen voting software used by a leading manufacturer has resigned from the technical advisory board of a provider of competing software.

As if California officials don't have enough to worry about ahead of the bewildering gubernatorial recall vote Oct. 7, computer scientists say shoddy balloting software could bungle the results and expose the election to fraud.

After weeks of defending itself against charges of bad programming and lax security, Diebold Election Systems is facing an independent, third-party audit of the software for its touch-screen voting machines.

A recent report that showed touch-screen voting machines could be vulnerable to hackers spurred the National Association of Secretaries of State, a majority of whose members are in charge of their states' elections, to consider whether the standards for the machines should be beefed up to prevent tampering.

According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system.

Diebold voting machines are used in 37 states. The entire state of Ohio is considering dumping its old system to buy Diebold. Georgia already did. The Diebold files, supposedly secret voting machine files left on an unprotected web site for nearly six years, are unlocking the truth.

Truth is, the Global Election Systems' Web site was a Pandora's box of controversy just waiting to happen. And it did happen - exposing Global's new owner, Green, Ohio-based Diebold Inc., to a new level of scrutiny. Now Diebold, and perhaps the whole electronic-voting industry, could pay the price.